Plastic Consuming Bacteria.

For starters, let me tell you an average plastic bottle almost take 450 years to decompose, and plastic has been on earth not longer than 70-80 years. But the amount we have produced is so much that if we stop plastic production today, it will take the next couple of 10 thousand years.

Ya, we have produced that much waste that we are unknowingly making an island out of it known as The Great Pacific Garbage Patch covering 1.6 mln km, which is about 3 times the size of France.

So are we going to clean this garbage up? Coming from my human mind, at this rate NEVER. But if we make some technological advancement in clean energy and clean production we could do something about the garbage problem.

Now here comes the Bacteria part -

Ideonella sakaiensis is a bacterium from the genus Ideonella and family Comamonadaceae capable of breaking down and consuming the plastic polyethene terephthalate (PET) as a sole carbon and energy source. The bacterium was originally isolated from a sediment sample taken outside of a plastic bottle recycling facility in Sakai, Japan.

Is this the first time?

No, before known degraders of PET were a small number of bacteria and fungi, including Fusarium solani, and no organisms were definitively known to degrade PET as a primary carbon and energy source.

A series of other breakthroughs in recent years means it could one day be possible to build industrial-scale facilities where enzymes chomp on piles of landfill-bound plastic or even spray them on the mountains of plastic that accumulate in the ocean or rivers.

Conclusion

Instead of hoping some miracle to happen , consider what you can do from your part. Contributing to sustain nature is not an extra-curricular but a sole right.